The Result of University Cost-Cutting Measures . . .

the Plausible Deniability Blog takes up where the PostModernVillage blog left off. While you'll see many of the same names here, PDB allows its writers and editors a space away from financial strum und drang that torpedoed the PMV blog.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

I can't help but think that the real
problem with contemporary conservatism is that it traps people
between external motivation and the expectation of an internal locus
of control.

This produces the ultimate mindfuck, a
powerful manipulative tool that projects tyranny far beyond the
actual abilities of the oppressor to harm the oppressed.

It operates on the assumption that the
reason for doing something (work, kindness, being “accountable”)
is outside the person (the expectations of a vengeful
God/country/king/marketplace/CEO), but the responsibility for doing
something is entirely inside the person. This would explain
why conservatives can believe both in authoritarian hierarchies and
also believe in personal responsibility. Consider that conservatives
support command and control structures that rely on punishment rather
than reward, deterrent rather than cooperation, submission rather
than empowerment. But they also support “self-starters,”
entrepreneurship, and “freedom” broadly speaking. These things
would seem to be incompatible unless the external motivation/internal
locus of control theory is applied.

In the conservative paradigm (which
governs almost all of our corporate, educational, and executive
political systems), people are trapped into believing that if they
did not achieve the proper outcome it is always their fault for not
being responsible enough, even though they were “just following
orders,” “just doing their jobs,” or, in the case of the latest
economic downturn, “doing everything right” by investing in the
market. The fact that their failure was highly likely, if not
inevitable, given their circumstances and resources, is exactly why
those in power tend to be conservative and operate by this set of
assumptions, regardless of what they officially say. This is why
Barack Obama can run as a liberal but, when he gets into office,
“punish” his foreign enemies with drone strikes when they get out
of line; this is how he can espouse a drill-and-test educational
system and a regime of massive internal surveillance. All of these
are based on the premise that motivations are external while all
responsibility is internal. Consider the arguments: the Syrian
government must be motivated to do what we want by the threat of
force. Children and teachers alike must be motivated by the threat of
the exam, upon which rides both their academic and their professional
futures. At the same time, we say things like “Assad brought this
on himself,” and “children must live up to standards of
excellence.”

Thus trapped in untenable positions,
people have little choice but to internalize the master narrative and
feel that they can and should act only in ways prescribed by whatever
authority they see as most operative in their lives. These
authorities become the external arbiters of their behavior and help
define their orientations to authority until something else has
sufficient force to supplant it. Thus a “wild” teenager finds
what he believes is “discipline” in the army. What he finds, of
course, is fear, and he does not know what to do with himself without
its threat. This is at least partially why so many returning vets
have no idea how to re-integrate into civilian life: they have not
identified with the new externalities, and there are no real means in
our culture to nurture (much less make a living from) what motivates
us internally.

This form of social control is subtle,
brilliant, and ultimately disabling, leading us to seek control in
other, usually self-destructive, ways, such as self-medication,
controlling relationships, cutting, mind-numbing entertainments. If
we engage in these too much, we find ourselves enmeshed in the
officially and formally authoritarian systems of control: prisons,
coercive “welfare” schemes, psychiatric “care.”

Despite the rhetoric, then, or perhaps
as an indicator of its true intent, people acting out of intrinsic
motivations are an existential threat to conservatives and to the
systems of control and command that they embody, maintain, and seek
to perpetuate, This is why the “geek” must be ridiculed or, when
useful, corporatized and monetized, indentured into his “proper
place as an engineer or an apparatchik. This is why the artist must
be marginalized, the humanities department defunded, and “blue sky”
research turned vassal to technological R&D. This is why mere
refinement is redefined as innovation and innovation is relegated to
the garage, the coffeehouse, the alternative communities of
open-source software and “maker” spaces.

This is what Kafka got right: the
motivations of the artists, the innovators, those who will help our
civilization survive when our climate changes or the meteor falls,
are internal, as basic as hunger, as clear as sweat.

We call one person mad who attacks a
public gathering for political purposes, but we call heroes those who
“engage the enemy” knowing full well that innocent civilians will
die in the process. Indeed, the war that we now look back on as “the
good war” also brought us the concept of “total war” and
involved both sides in the wholesale targeting of civilian
populations in order the wear the enemy down and force a surrender.

Granted, some of our disconnect here
involves how our media cover such events: the details of an “act of
terrorism” are repeated endlessly and dissected microscopically;
the families of those who died are interviewed, the life stories of
the dead recounted. If any information at all is reported about the
effects of war on “the enemy,” it's extremely vague, of the
“we've got them on the run” variety, often reduced to number of
missiles fired, sorties run, troops deployed, bodies recovered. In
other words, “terrorism” has human effects and war has
statistical effects.

But underlying the impulse to report
this way we find, I believe, the heart of the matter: we judge the
mass slaughter of innocent people not by its effects or by its real
horror or even by its relative justice (or lack thereof) but by the
perceived intentions of its perpetrators.

Killing a bunch of Afghans who had
nothing to do with attacking us is acceptable because we believe that
our intentions are pure, even if part of our strategy is to so
terrify the population that it will no longer “harbor terrorists.”
We judge the terrorists' intentions as impure and unjust (“What did
we ever do to them?” we often ask.) based on what we see as
individual motivations toward evil instead of selfless impulses of
national defense.

But, of course, the terrorist, just
like the soldier, believes that he is doing the right thing,
defending his homeland from the imperialist West and his faith from
the infidels.

And the effects on those who die are
exactly the same: pain and trauma, destruction of bodies and
disruption of lives.

In the end, both war and terrorism turn
us all into psychopaths, allowing us to condone evil acts for the
sake, we think, of noble causes.

Monday, September 2, 2013

While the human mind is capable of
rational thought, humans are, by and large, not rationalistic;
rather, we're totemic and associative. We love to think we're
reasonable and will go deep into rationalizing why we're right, but
to question the foundations of our preconceived notions is going too
far for most people most of the time.

Messing with our preconceived ideas
messes with our sense of identity, and while ideas can be constructed
and reconstructed essentially at will, identities take years,
lifetimes, and sometimes many lifetimes, to develop.

The problem this causes Americans in
particular is that our political system was developed by
self-declared rationalists under the assumption that with the proper
training and education, everyone would think just like them.

That is why they put confidence in such
concepts as “the marketplace of ideas,” which was supposed to
allow reasoned debate that would lead to the best solutions being
supported; they trusted in deliberative bodies and in the notion that
people would, in the end, elect representatives who were better than
they were, more able to govern.

But at the same time, the new nation
stripped off a lot of those cultural ghosts that form the traditions,
rites, customs, and mores that help define the individual, that help
create identity.

On the one hand, this was a great boon:
many of those European ways of being were fraught with inequality and
oppression, and good riddance to them. But this also created a
perpetual crisis in American life: without an ancient culture to tell
us who we are, Americans were forced to create new identities with
the bits and pieces left behind and the new ways of existence
discovered along the way. There is, then, a sort of urgency in the
American psyche, a desperation for identity. We can hear it most
plaintively in those who call themselves conservatives. Uncomfortable
with the need to constantly create anew, they cling to an imagined
past wherein these questions were settled. The tone of voice of a
Michele Bachmann or a Glenn Beck betrays this desperation: they keen
out a world in constant crisis. This crisis is in direct proportion
to their discomfort with the American project, which is bricolage,
building an identity with what you have, inspired by what you want.

This is also why those who whine most
loudly about “freedom” are the very ones who practice it the
worst, gravitating toward hierarchical corporate structures, police
state practices, walled compounds, and strict religions. This is why
“blue” states tend to fare better on measures of quality of life,
stable marriages, and productivity. Those who are more familiar with
personal ambiguity are less likely to let others fail, less comforted
by others' struggles, more likely to support the sort of costs of
“finding yourself” through education, small-scale
entrepreneurship, personal failure. They've been there themselves, or
they've been close enough for it to have scared them into compassion
instead of contempt. They've seen how struggle is part of
success, not a punishment for some inherent inadequacy.

And this is America at its best,
forcing us through our personal crises to think compassionately, to
act out of fellow-feeling instead of fear.